I have a Rosie the Riveter magnet on my refrigerator door, and seeing the woman dressed in work clothes and kerchief and pumping her fist makes me smile.  I wish my mother were still alive and we could talk about the years when she was a young journalist in Detroit. The factories had ramped up for the war effort and she was newly married, and learning the ropes of what proved to be a short-lived career.

The little Free Library in  New Hope & Solebury, Pennsylvania

 My mother would abandon this work by necessity after she had given birth to four children and my father’s medical practice had taken off.  What I knew of her writing skills would surface  in her letters, and she could wield a poison pen. Later, I would hear her lifetime as a passionate reader in a tome, she called  “Ma’s Memoirs,” which channeled a good bit of Mark Twain’s sensibilities in her chronicle of those early days.

While my husband, Charles, shared this remembrance:

“In World War II my mother worked as a volunteer for the American Red Cross in Detroit, MI.  The Red Cross occupied an old brownstone building on Jefferson Avenue not far from the center of the city. Jefferson was the major artery from downtown to the east side and teemed with constant automobile, truck, bus, and streetcar traffic with its major automobile plants, the Belle Isle island park in the middle of the Detroit River, and residential areas of all colors and flavors.  The first and upper floors were devoted to such ladylike volunteer operations as rolling bandages and knitting sweaters for the soldiers and sailors.  Not for this was my mother; she worked in the cellar, with great pride, in “Packing and Shipping,” filling great cardboard cartons with the products of the floors above where the activity permitted, as she perceived it, endless gossiping.  She much preferred the more physically active filling of great containers and the piling and stacking of them, activities that seemed so much more closely related to the war effort.”

As a young widow of means she would restart her life again in midlife, packing up the contents of her house this time and relocating from Grosse Pointe to Bucks County, PA.  I suspect she must have decided early on —  as someone who had not suffered during The Great Depression — that she would volunteer rather than engage in a career for money.  Yet she did so nonetheless for a rather astonishing 40 years at the little library in New Hope, PA.

Some of the choices my mother and mother-in-law made were dictated by circumstance, but they came at a time when they might still have been discouraged from truly pursuing careers of their own.  Yes, it was OK to be a reporter, if that meant working on what were then a newspaper’s society pages — and women were not particularly welcome in the news departments even in the 1970s, when I began to follow in her footsteps.  It was hard fight to write stories with serious news content;  it was hard to fight to return to beats that I had loved after the births of my children.

Yet to relinquish all hopes of stretching professionally was an exchange I wasn’t willing to make, though there were many years when I would feel as it I was coming up short in both places.  It would always be hard to balance family and working life. It is still hard. I see the ebb and flow of this in my own life yet, and in the lives of the students I am tutoring.

When I’ve worked with students this semester who are reading the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, for the first time, I think to myself,, “Well, if you thought you had to fight for your rights, just imagine what it might have been for this bedridden character? The treatment for women suffering from what was call “neurasthenia” was truly draconian … it called for ultimate bedrest and no intellectual stimulation.  That prescription failed then, and it surely doesn’t work now. 

More than a half-century later, when the women who manned the factories, were forced to give up their jobs when men came back from the war – well, it’s hard not to feel a great injustice was done to them. Think of all that wasted human potential!  But then think of the women, like those brilliant African American women mathematicians who blazed a trail for NASA, albeit largely under the radar. They played a vital role in the early years of the U.S. space program, and they have finally been given their due.

The war of the sexes, the discrimination based upon race, gender, or ethnicity, remains as American as apple pie. But the costs of these antiquated policies are ultimately spirit-killing and debilitating for all of us.

We must learn from the lessons imparted by these female trailblazers and build on them.

©2021 Kristin Nord for SeniorWomen.com